After Effects Wiggle Effect

In After Effects, use the wiggle expression to create random movement by modifying numbers, not keyframes. Sometimes, our animation lacks character or feels a little lifeless. What would fix the issue is a slight bit of movement.

Wiggle After Effects Expression
After Effects Wiggle Effect Examples
After Effects Wiggle Expression Y Axis Only

Quickly add a whole new dimension of random to your wiggles with this quick expression in After Effects.

Wiggle Expression Tips for After Effects CC 1. Control the Wiggle Using Sliders. The first technique we’re going to go over is how to control your wiggle expression using slider controls. This can be a really useful way to control the effect so you can make it look the way you want it to.
This simple After Effects expression will make any object wiggle in place. This simple expression can add jagged motion to any layer in your After Effects file to create a trendy shaking effect. With the rising popularity of glitch effects in video editing, it’s a useful skill to know how to make a layer shake in After Effects.
So I'm going to alt click on the rotation stopwatch. I'm gonna come in here and I'm just going to type wiggle, and you can see if you're running After Effects 2020 and I believe 2019 it does this, it's going to prompt you. And so with the wiggle expression, we need the word wiggle and then we need something inside parentheses.
What this does is tell After Effects how frequently we want the wiggle to happen, and then how much physical space we want our position to wiggle, in pixels. Wiggle(A,B) In the above expression, A represents the frequency of the movement while B represents the amount of movements in pixels.

If you learn only one expression while using After Effects, it needs to be the wiggle expression. By using the simple expression wiggle() you can quickly add simulated random movement to your layers in After Effects. However, if you’ve worked with the After Effects wiggle expression for any amount of time, then you probably know that the wiggle expression has a very specific look that can sometimes be annoying and difficult to work with.

In the following video tutorial, AE expert Mikey Borup shows us how to use the random() function inside of the wiggle expression to get an even more random looking effect.

This video was first shared by Mikey Borup on his YouTube channel. Thanks for sharing, Mikey!

If you want to quickly add this expression into your next motion graphic project, you can simply copy and paste the following expression:

wiggle(random(1,2),random(20,100));

Want to learn more about using the After Effects wiggle expression? Check out a few of the following articles:

Using Wiggle to Create Random Movement in Adobe After Effects – PremiumBeat
Expression Language Reference – Adobe
Random Motion – Motion Script

Have any tips for working with the “random()” function? Share your tips in the comments below.

Sign In

Wiggle After Effects Expression

Register